TranshumanismAnswered

Can transhumanism and brain-machine interfaces replicate the human soul?

Ernst asks how the transhumanist project and brain-machine interface technology relate to the hylomorphic understanding of man.

Answer

You can build a machine to imitate man; the Chinese have robots that walk, run, wave, and could probably play you a game of chess. But they have no soul, and that is what makes us unique, not the flesh and bones, which are only attachments to the soul. When I die, my flesh and bones go into the grave and disintegrate, but my soul is unaffected by death; it is so unaffected that, to be normal, it can no longer live in a dead body and must escape into another realm. So all this brain-machine interfacing and polymorphic talk is a label for man's desperate search to find out who he is, and he cannot find it because he looks at the surface and will not go beneath it to the soul that God made, which makes him eternal. There is no way to replicate a soul; we do not even know what it is, only that Scripture tells us we are body and soul. When Jesus returns and our souls are reunited with new bodies, those bodies will express the soul in its most magnificent way, for eternity. That is the day we wait for, and the day the transhumanists will never reach; they will wish for something higher and never get it.

Dr. Robert Sungenis

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